All of sam's Comments + Replies

Got over my avoidance of responding to replies here after a bit :)

I've tried a lot of self-help flavoured stuff (atomic habits etc.) before and it hasn't worked, and Focusing seemed quite different. I've given it a go and I think I'll try and work a bit more with it. After just a short session, I feel like I gained a significant insight, that I have a crippling fear of "being in trouble" that manifests as a tightness in my lower chest, and seems to activate a lot when I think about specific things I'm avoiding. Thanks for the resources, and the new way of looking at the problem.

I have serious, serious issues with avoidance. I would like some advice on how to improve, as I suspect it is significantly holding me back.

Some examples of what I mean

  • I will not respond to an email or an urgent letter for weeks at a time, even while it causes me serious anxiety
  • I will procrastinate starting work in the morning, sometimes leading to me doing nothing at all by the afternoon
  • I will avoid looking for jobs or other opportunities, I have very strong avoidance here, but I'm not sure why
  • I will make excuses to avoid meetings and social situations ve
... (read more)
2Selfmaker662
I want to suggest a long-term approach: learning to work with the emotions behind such persistent problems. Methods like IFS, Focusing,  lovingkindness meditations are the right tools.    They *can* lead to practical improvements fairly quickly—once you get the hang of them. But learning to do them even right enough takes months of effort, curiosity, support from a community or a mentor. These things are basically meditations, subject to standard difficulties like overeffort, subtle wrong mindsets etc. They also tend to focus first on whatever feels most urgent to your subconscious system—like relationship stress or background anxiety you’ve gotten used to—so the email issue might not be the first thing that shifts.   Still, this is the only thing that really worked for me. And once it started working, it *really* worked.   If you’re interested, I can send my favourite links.
9plex
I have had and solved fairly extreme versions of this in myself, and have helped people with debilitating versions of this resolve it multiple times. You're stuck in a loop of some part of you pushing to do the object level thing so hard that it has no sensitivity to the parts of you that are averse to it. Whenever you notice you're spinning your wheels; stop trying to force through the object level action and let yourself actually notice the feeling of resistance with open curiosity. Let let unfold into the full message that brain fragment is trying to send, rather than overcompressed "bad"/"aversion".

Checked replies so far, no one has given you the right answer.

Whenever you don't do something, you have a reason for not doing it.
If you find yourself stuck in a cycle of intending to do, and not doing, it's always because you're not taking your reason for NOT doing it seriously; you're often habitually ignoring it.

When you successfully take your reasons for not doing something seriously, either you stop wanting to do it, or you change how you're doing it, or your reason for not doing it simply goes away.

So, what does it mean/look like to take your reason ... (read more)

1shawnghu
1. If this would not obviously make things worse, be more socially connected with people who have expectations of you; not necessarily friends but possibly colleagues or people who simply assume you should be working at times and get feedback about that in a natural way. It's possible that the prospect of this is anxiety-inducing and would be awful but that it would not actually be very awful. 2. Recognize that you don't need to do most things perfectly or even close to it, and as a corollary, you don't need to be particularly ready to handle tasks even if they are important. You can handle an email or an urgent letter without priming yourself or being in the right state of mind. The vast majority of things are this way. 3. Sit in the start position of your task, as best as you can operationalize that (e.g, navigate to the email and open it, or hit the reply button and sit in front of it), for one minute, without taking your attention off of the task. Progress the amount of time upwards as necessary/possible. (One possible success-mode from doing this is that you get bored of being in this position or you become aware that you're tired of the thing not being done. (You would hope your general anxiety about the task in day-to-day life would achieve this for you, but it's not mechanically optimized enough to.) Another possible success-mode is that the immediate feelings you have about doing the task subside.) 4. Beta-blockers.
2trevor
VIsualize yourself doing the thing until you do it. Note that this comes with substantial risk towards making you avoidant/averse to visualizing yourself doing the thing until you do it; this is a recursive procedurally generated process and you should expect to need to keep on your toes in order to succeed. Aversion factoring is a good resource to start with, and Godel Escher and Bach is a good resource for appreciating the complexity required for maintenance and the inadequacy of simple strategies.
2Sergii
I have similar issues, severity varies over time. If I am in a bad place, things that help best: - taking care of mental health. I do CBT when i'm in worse shape, and take SSRIs. YMMV. both getting dianosed and treated are important. this also includes regular exercise and good sleep. what you have described might be (although does not have to be) related to depression, anxiety, attention disorders. - setting a timer for a short time, can be as short as 1min, and doing one of the avoided tasks for just that 1 minute. it kind if "breaks the spell" for me - journaling, helps to "debug" the problems, and in most cases leads to wring down plans / intervations / resolutuons
5Garrett Baker
I recommend you read at least the first chapter of Getting Things Done, and do the corresponding exercises. In particular, this one, which he uses to provide evidence his model of productivity is correct
2cubefox
See here. (Perhaps also relevant: PDA)
1jam_brand
I've had similar issues downstream of what I'd somehow failed to realize was a clinically-significant level of anxiety, so that's something to maybe consider checking into.
4Seth Herd
Read about Ugh fields on LW Edit: this doesn't include practical advice, but a theoretical understanding of the issues at play is often helpful in implementing practical strategies
1p
If you haven't already, talk to a guy! (typically a therapist but doesn't have to be) I have something like this but for decisions, where I will avoid making decisions for mysterious reasons (we figured out it's because I can't be sure it'd be pareto optimal, among other reasons). I now notice more often when I'm doing this, and correct more gracefully.
6p.b.
What helps me to overcome the initial hurdle to start doing work in the morning:  1. Write a list of the stuff you have to do the next day 2. Make it very fine-grained with single tasks (especially the first few) being basically no effort. 3. Tick them off one by one Also:  1. Tell people what you have to do and when you are going to do it and that you have done it. Like, a colleague, or your team, or your boss. 2. Do stuff with other people. Either actually together, like pair programming, or closely intertwined.  I think it also helps to take something you are good at and feel good about and in that context take responsibility for something and/or interact with/present to people. Only this kind of social success will build the confidence to overcome social anxiety, but directly trying to do the social stuff you feel worst about usually backfires (at least for me). 

Some people think that personally significant numbers cropping up in their daily lives is some kind of meaningful sign. For instance, seeing a license plate with their birth year on it, or a dead friend’s old house number being the price of their grocery shop.
 

I find myself getting very irritated with family members who believe this.
 

I don’t think anybody reading this is the kind of person who needs to read it. But these family members are not the kind of person who would read an explanation of why it’s ridiculous, and I’m irritated enough that I... (read more)

I think when explaining it to non-technical people, just saying something like “it’s a big next word predictor” is close enough to the truth to work.

1CstineSublime
Not for my purposes. For starters I use a lot of image and video generation, and even then you have U-nets and DITs so I need something more generalized. Also, if I'm not mistaken, what you've described is only applicable to autoregressive transformers like ChatGPT. Compare to say T5 which is not autoregressive.

To be clear, I think it’s very unlikely they are conscious etc., this is a comment on a reflexive process going on in my head

I find that the new personalities of 4o trigger my “person” detectors too much, and I feel uncomfortable extracting work from them. 

1sam
To be clear, I think it’s very unlikely they are conscious etc., this is a comment on a reflexive process going on in my head

Ask 4o and o4-mini to “Make a detailed profile of [your name]”. Then ask o3.

This is a useful way to demonstrate just how qualitatively different and insidious o3’s lying is.

I'm not sure that focusing on the outcomes makes sense when thinking about the psychology of individual soldiers. Presumably refusal was rare enough that most soldiers were unaware of what the outcome of refusal was in practice. I think it would probably be rational for soldiers to expect severe consequences absent being aware of a specific case of refusal going unpunished.

o3 lies much more blatantly and confidently than other models, in my limited experiments. 

Over a number of prompts, I have found that it lies, and when corrected on those lies, apologies, and tells some other lies.

This is obviously not scientific, more of a vibes based analysis, but its aggressive lying and fabricating of sources is really noticeable to me in a way it hasn’t been for previous models.

Has anyone else felt this way at all?

Apparently, some (compelling?) evidence of life on an exoplanet has been found.

I have no ability to judge how seriously to take this or how significant it might be. To my untrained eye, it seems like it might be a big deal! Does anybody with more expertise or bravery feel like wading in with a take?

Link to a story on this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html

simply instruct humans to kill themselves

 

This is obviously not the most important thing in this post, but it confused me a little. What do you mean by this? That an ASI would be persuasive enough to make humans kill themselves or what?

3Max Harms
Yep. I think humans will be easy to manipulate, including by telling them to do things that lead to their deaths. One way to do that is to make them suicidal, another is to make them homicidal, and perhaps the easiest is to tell them to do something which "oops!" ends up being fatal (e.g. "mix these chemicals, please").

LLMs (probably) have a drive to simulate a coherent entity

Maybe we can just prepend a bunch of examples of aligned behaviour before a prompt, presented as if the model had done this itself, and see if that improves its behaviour.

Note: I am extremely open to other ideas on the below take and don't have super high confidence in it

It seems plausible to me that successfully applying interpretability techniques to increase capabilities might be net-positive for safety.

You want to align the incentives of the companies training/deploying frontier models with safety. If interpretable systems are more economically valuable than uninterpretable systems, that seems good!

It seems very plausible to me that if interpretability never has any marginal benefit to capabilities, the little nuggets o... (read more)

If you beat a child every time he talked about having experience or claimed to be conscious he will stop talking about it - but he still has experience

3Dagon
There's a big presumption there.  If he was a p-zombie to start with, he still has non-experience after the training.  We still have no experience-o-meter, or even a unit of measure that would apply. For children without major brain abnormalities or injuries, who CAN talk about it, it's a pretty good assumption that they have experiences.  As you get more distant from your own structure, your assumptions about qualia should get more tentative.